Research

With the internationalization of cooperative activities, opportunities for conversations between native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) are increasing, but conversations between NSs and NNSs are not always easy. This paper proposes a Speech Speed Awareness System to support conversations between NSs and NNSs by displaying a screen when the speech rate of the NS becomes too fast for the NNS. We analyzed the speech behaviors of NSs and NNSs from a conversation experiment of word-association games conducted to examine…

A video communication system “Being Here System (BHS)” provides a feeling of being in the same room with a remote user when conversing. Different from a conventional videoconferencing system that displays the raw image from the remote camera, BHS displays the image that is processed in realtime to match with the local site. It extracts the remote user’s figure from the raw image. It also takes the image of the local site that is hidden by the display. Then it…

With a little help from my native friends: Keyword typing improves mutual understanding in L2 conversation. References Hiromi Hanawa, Xiaoyu Song, Mengyuan Tang, Tomoo Inoue, Speakers’ empowerment with keywords: the speaking competency development for multilingual to contribute in a real-time interaction, Collaboration and Technology, LNCS 10391, pp.148-163, doi>10.1007/978-3-319-63874-4_12, Springer, 2017.8. Hiromi Hanawa, Xiaoyu Song, Tomoo Inoue, Keyword generation by native speaker is quick and useful in conversation between native and non-native speaker, Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE 21th International Conference…

We proposed a method to increase the recognition rate of non-native speakers’ speech by inferring non-native speakers’ speech from the native speakers’ speech, which has higher recognition rates.

This research goal is to facilitate real-time serial cooperative work. In real-time serial cooperative work, the order of subtasks is important because a failure of the order leads to a failure of the whole task. So, coordinating the order of workers’ subtasks is necessary to smoothly accomplish the tasks. In this paper, we propose a method that uses vibration to present the action order and coordinate the orders. We conducted a user study to verify the effectiveness of the method…

Super-real experience can be realized by combining the objects in both physical and VR environments. We are working on using such kind of super-real experience system as a safety training system. To keep safe, it is necessary to know what the dangers are. But it’s hard to understand them just by listening to lectures. On the other hand, it is also risky to experience the dangers in the real world. Here we use a system that combines objects in both…

Immersive self mental healthcare system has been developed based on a visual counseling method. References Asuki Nakanishi, Yasuhito Noguchi, Toshiya Nakajima, Zhen Yang, Atsuko Matsumoto, Takeshi Kamita, Tsunetsugu Munakata, Tomoo Inoue, A VR self mental healthcare system by SAT-based method, IPSJ SIG Technical Report, Vol.2017-DCC-15, No.35, pp.1-8, 2017.1. Asuki Nakanishi, Yasuhito Noguchi, Toshiya Nakajima, Zhen Yang, Atsuko Matsumoto, Takeshi Kamita, Tsunetsugu Munakata, Tomoo Inoue, Development of a SAT-based self mental healthcare system adopting immersive head-mounted display, VRSJ Research Report, Vol.21,…

A video communication system “Being Here System (BHS)” provides a feeling of being in the same room with a remote user when conversing. Different from a conventional videoconferencing system that displays the raw image from the remote camera, BHS displays the image that is processed in realtime to match with the local site. It extracts the remote user’s figure from the raw image. It also takes the image of the local site that is hidden by the display. Then it…

In multi-participant conversations, we can hear the voices from multiple directions, which can be helpful with listening comprehension. In the case of remote conversations, we use simple 2-channel stereo acoustic technology to let the user be able to hear voices from multiple directions. References 野口康人, 叶璟, 成合智子, 井上智雄, 多人数遠隔会話のための音像定位分散の効果, 情報処理学会論文誌：デジタルコンテンツ, Vol4, No.1, pp.26-36, 2016.2.

An illustration is a key factor to attract document readers. However, not everybody can make it in good quality. Thus illustration has a high demand. Although conventionally clients request skilled creators to draw illustrations with good rewards, there exist huge needs for less expensive illustrations. We propose a novel method of generating such illustrations by crowd-sourced microtasks. In this method, a basic drawing is generated by unskilled crowd workers from one photograph. Experimentation to study the feasibility of the proposed…